A jumbo-sized problem - Africa’s elephants in peril

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

Seventy years ago, there were between 3 million and 5 million elephants in Africa. Today, as the number of African bush elephants has dropped to nearly half a million, this magnificent animal faces extinction in some parts of the continent.

“If conservation action is not forthcoming, elephants may
become locally extinct in some parts of Africa within 50
years,” warns the World Wildlife Fund.

Others have said that elephants could be extinct in Africa within
our lifetime.

Recent news about elephant populations has been heartbreaking.
These wonderful animals are being slaughtered on a truly horrific
scale.

Last week, it was reported that the elephant population of
Mozambique has almost halved since 2009, due to poaching. There
were over 20,000 elephants in the southeast African state in
2009, but last year the total was down to 10,300.

This comes on the back of news that half of the elephants in
Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park – one of the largest national
parks in the whole of Africa – have been lost to poachers in just
one year.

The decline in numbers of the African elephants is a shocking
indictment of the way that modern man has exploited the natural
world. Not so long ago, it was considered “the thing” to
do for wealthy westerners to go to Africa to butcher elephants
for “sport.”

One of the most famous of the “big game hunters” was
Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell, aka “Karamojo Bell,” who
was described as ‘the greatest of all elephant hunters’.
It is thought Bell shot and killed over 1,000 elephants for their
ivory. Licensed hunting still goes on, regrettably. In 2009, it
was reported how an American huntress, Teressa
Groenewald-Hagerman, won a bet by becoming the first woman in the
world to kill an elephant with a
bow and arrow.

As sickening as elephant hunting is, the biggest threat to
numbers today comes from illegal poaching for ivory. Data
revealed that in 2011, elephant poaching reached its highest
levels in 16 years. In 2013, around 20,000 elephants in Africa
were killed by poachers.

The problem is at its worst in central Africa where 64% of the
elephant population has been lost in the last decade. In December
2013,
new figures revealed that if poaching rates continued at the
same levels, then Africa is likely to lose 20% of its elephants
in the next ten years.

Are we simply going to sit back and allow this to happen? In
1990, the international sale of ivory was banned, but demand in
some countries is still there – making poaching a very lucrative
business indeed. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake,
and poachers are willing to run the risk of getting apprehended
when the rewards are so high. Some argue that because the rewards
are so high, only the death penalty for convicted poachers would
be an adequate deterrent and make poachers think twice before
killing elephants.

In 2013, a government minister in Tanzania called for a
“shoot-to-kill”policy against poachers in his country.

Poachers must be harshly punished because they are merciless
people who wantonly kill our wildlife and sometimes wardens...
“The only way to solve this problem is to execute the killers
on the spot," Khamis Kagasheki said.

Shoot-to-kill policies against poachers have been carried out
elsewhere: in Zimbabwe once was in place from 1984 until the
mid-1990s (today there are mandatory nine-year prison sentences
for ivory poachers and those found in possession of raw ivory).
Botswana has adopted a ‘shot-to-kill’ policy too-
perhaps this explains, at least in part, why the country has one
of the lowest elephant poaching rates in the world.

A few months ago I was lucky enough to visit the
Hwange National Park in northwest Zimbabwe – home to Africa’s
largest single concentration of elephants. It didn‘t take us too
long to come across a herd, and it was a wonderful experience to
get reasonably close-up to them in our jeep. Hwange is home to
about 20,000 elephants

but poaching, as in other national parks, remains a problem. One
of our party remarked on the high number of carcasses we saw. In
2013, around 300 elephants in Hwange were poisoned by poachers
with cyanide. The rangers are doing their best to protect
Hwange’s wildlife, but the problem is that the park covers a huge
area – it’s roughly the size of Belgium, and so it’s very hard to
adequately patrol.

The Zimbabwean authorities have come up with a scheme to raise
more money for anti-poaching patrols and boost conservation, but
it’s controversial to say the least, as it involves selling some
of the park’s elephants to zoos. In January, it was confirmed
that 62 baby elephants would be exported to France, the United
Arab Emirates and China. In May, it was reported that Zimbabwe
was to sell wild animals - including elephants -
to Angola.

‘The selling off of live elephants will enable the wildlife
authority to raise enough funds to protect the jumbos and other
wildlife,” a Zimbabwean official said.

But the scheme has been criticized by wildlife campaigners in
Zimbabwe, who have described taking baby elephants away from
their mothers as “cruel.”

One way or another, the battle against the poachers has to be
won.

However, that means more resources being put into wildlife
protection, in countries which are among the world’s poorest –
and in some cases, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo,
which have been badly hit by war. We hear the phrase
“international community” a lot from the US and its
closest allies, but the catastrophic decline in elephant
populations in Africa can only be reversed by a new-found
international commitment – from all the countries of the world –
to save the elephant and indeed other endangered species.

Amid all the gloom there are signs of hope that the African
elephant can be saved.

It didn’t make the headlines it should have, but the announcement
by the Chinese authorities that they would phase outChina’s
ivory market made during a public destruction of 662kg of
confiscated illegal ivory, was a very positive development.

Attitudes towards the ivory trade are changing in southeast Asia
- traditionally the largest market for ivory products: a recent
poll in Hong Kong showed 75 percent
support for a total ban on elephant ivory sales.

In China, 95 percent of people support such a ban.

The hosting, in Botswana, of an African Elephant Summit in March,
to focus on the problems and discuss solutions, was another step
in the right direction. “The overall objective of this
meeting is to secure commitments at the highest political level
to effectively protect the elephants and significantly reduce the
trends of killings of elephants,” a spokesperson from the
Botswana Environment Ministry said. Around 20 countries attended
the summit.

There’s also been some success “on the ground” in
protecting elephant numbers. It was recently reported that
elephant numbers in Uganda, which plummeted to around 700-800 in
the early 1980s, are now up back up to around 5,000. The use of
cutting-edge technology by rangers in their battle against
poachers has been hailed as a major factor in the country’s
conservation success – an example other countries could copy,
with the help of international funding.

In the 1990
film,“White Hunter,
Black Heart,”Clint
Eastwood plays the hunting- obsessed Hollywood director John
Wilson (based on the real-life director of“The African
Queen,”John
Huston). He‘s challenged by his screenwriter, Peter Verrill,
about his desire to shoot an elephant while on location in
Africa. Verrill describes the elephant as“one of the rarest, noblest
creatures that walks the face of this crummy
earth,”and says
that killing one is a crime, to which Wilson
replies:“You’re
wrong. kid. It’s not a crime to kill an elephant. It’s bigger
than all that. It’s a sin to kill an elephant. You understand?
It’s the only sin you can go out and buy a license for and go out
and commit…. Do you understand me? Of course, you don’t. I don’t
even understand myself.”

Wilson was right. It is a sin to kill an elephant and a sin of
enormous proportions if we allow the current slaughter to
continue.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.